Opinion

JAMES POULOS: Should we seek our fortunes elsewhere?

Is 2016 the year many Americans will finally decide to seek their fortunes elsewhere?

Never in the history of the world has a country of comparable size and power sustained its dominance without large numbers of citizens or subjects picking up stakes and relocating, whether near or far abroad. To be sure, Americans followed suit in the 19th century, settling the frontier in massive waves and even experimenting with colonial ambitions in the wake of the Spanish-American War. But American democracy and, even more, American habits ensured that the frontier was swiftly closed and the possession of the Philippines and Cuba short-lived.

In recent decades, the instinct for staying home has only strengthened – as has the presumption that Americans are entitled, in virtue of their citizenship, to a life of adequacy (if not flourishing) in the homeland. Positive visions of the libertarian Land of Opportunity and the securitarian social safety net dovetailed with superficially contradictory negative visions of lowered sights and increased immobility brought on by the economic crisis and the limits of competition as an engine of growth and dynamism.

As Peter Thiel has unnervingly observed, the economic competition of all against all tends to squander vast energies on eking out marginal gains in oversaturated markets, and on trying to hedge against the perceived domination of chance and luck in the achievement of sudden advantage. And as critics of crony corporatism have observed – as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville – the rise of a powerful patronage system, which offers beneficiaries a way of short-circuiting the arduous, uncertain struggle for marginal gains, tends to hardwire large, established businesses into positions of influence reinforced by ongoing subsidies and rent-seeking.

These broad trends, penetrating down into the intimate details of everyday life, have aggravated the populist spirit even as they have sapped popular strength. Families have contracted geographically – with the typical American living just 18 miles away from mom, inclusive of the 44-mile median distance in the rural-dominated Rocky Mountain states – but continue to weaken and fragment. “In the mid-1960s, about 20 percent of the population moved in any given year,” American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks has noted, citing Census Bureau figures. “By 1990, it was approaching 15 percent. Today it’s closer to 10 percent. The percentage that moves between states has fallen by nearly half since the early 1990s. Curiously, some of the Americans who would seem poised to gain the most from moving appear to be among the most stuck. Today’s pent-up rage, frustration and depression – dramatized by the Trump and Sanders insurgencies – reflects above all a Land of Opportunity that just doesn’t offer enough promise, to say nothing of adventure, for enough of its citizens.

True, even among the relatively well off, many Americans seem to have lost their taste for adventure, sacrifice, purpose and all the rest. The endless grumbling in certain elite quarters about the collapse of a sense of national service is not just a function of idle prejudice. But U.S. economic stagnation, the interminable culture war, the ISIS threat and even Europe’s struggle to find a way forward seem to be coalescing into a historically strong case for many more Americans to venture abroad in search of something that matters more than whatever awaits languishing at home. Rather than serving the nation within the same rut they’re accustomed to, many disenchanted Americans may be more tempted to find a synthesis between personal interest and the elusive grandeur of human life by forging, as the settlers of the West once did, into worlds far more mysterious and rich with the promise of new risks or fresh repose.

At first blush, that seems sad for America. The last thing we would seem to need is the kind of “brain drain” – or worse, ambition drain – that has afflicted countries worldwide whose own citizens gravitate to our own shores. On the other hand, it seems equally clear that the current configuration of our political economy cries out for the kind of restructuring that can rarely be achieved through any other peaceful means. Our bitter paralysis over immigration pits those who know we need more kinetic social energy against those who know we’re already suffering a surfeit of potential social energy. As physics-minded political thinkers since Montesquieu would likely remind us, this kind of distemper is a product of the closed system that America has become. For those early and mid-modern theorists, the malaise of political bodies that are badly mobilized and immobilized in constrained systems leads to bad government and perverse intuitions about the aims of governance. Today’s harsh realities – from economic stagnation and culture and class warfare to the rising threat of random terror and the dominance of historically unpopular presidential candidates – lend great credence to these warnings from the past.

But if the physics analogy holds, it’s likely that the pressure imposed by America’s interlocking and intractable challenges could be just what’s needed to break the deleterious mystique fueling our collective expectations about the sort of livelihood that our country somehow owes us.

We could all use a jolt of fresh perspective on what keeps us the exceptional country we still are. The paradoxical idea that our greatness depends on our ability to export ourselves, and not just our way of life, may be uncomfortable at first. But those who try it first may find, as have Americans of yore, worthy struggles and new horizons.

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